We have crossed many rivers
but anywhere a mother’s touch, anywhere
family there is common ground, home and warmth
couches around the family table, nakfa for coffee, nakfa
for tea, coca cola for the ceremony of meals yielded from
work and harvest, bright smiles and shared plates,
same needs, same needs

Labradorite rock
gleaming blue glint in polished feldspar,
sky and water swimming in matter,
northern lights held in the hand

I’d give you a stone, if I had one,
a token of my vision of the best of our romance
captured in rocks cultured under midnight sun
forever like the traveler of Ella Fitzgerald’s
voice riding radio ripple to outer space, as large
as constellation’s everspreading embrace

I kiss your lips like Lucy’s cordial, a flask
of something delicious and good, eat the daily
replenished bread of your arms, my heart squinched
wanting more contiguousness for our handheld
expanses as vast as the cast of an aurora

Laying flowers side by side on the table
to array the palette of a bouquet, my jackleg fingers
in this matter remembering the words of
Thich Nhat Hanh, “leave space in
between things.”

Looking towards learning skillful compositions,
juxtapositions of color and shape and mood, so many
ways to make and discover frontiers

Which reminds me of you–how you
would have every day novel, a zany birthday party
on a dance floor platform for whirling happiness, your
camera curiosity seeking out photos like the world
is full of easter eggs, and it is

Yet sometimes the spicy lightning
of your attention’s like you’re zapping barbed xrays
of unjust situations with moralizing words–promising
them their comeuppance

Condemnation of entire domains
heuristically earned yet with wild daisies of grace
sprouting exceptions to the rules and you smile with
surprise like the cheer of holding my hand and running
through a sprinkler

I’m growing a whole bunch of exceptions for you,
a lawn, a street, a town, a county, a country, the world–
I’m gathering them and the other flowers
for the fiesta of our lives

In actuality
there was the ladening of burden
dispensed unequally on the cast of fraternity,
the clenched taking of it, muscle taxed,
mind gritted, hollowed out until what’s left
either’s hulked husk or honed bone
body polished to an ivory knife
pushing abacus’s possibility
of mutiny

The Morrocan men I met
had some echt fatherliness, the
responsible gentleness of which conjured
femininity to my European-American
lens

Homegrown walks
through the neighborhood, children
dancing like dolphins alongside, tell me
a story, give me an apple, sing me
a song

Musicians in galibiyas played
a music box of sound on walks back from
parties, their late night returns adjoining
the sacred hour of early morning spiritual
commuters pattering like the shine of
ecclesiastical chandeliers

At the mosque the soaring moan
curtain of woon–call to God, call to Allah–
meet us like the slow and peaceful glide
of the crane to his nest in
the minaret